Levant his usual flamboyant self
Self-admitted pundit pleads fair comment
It was a completely unrepentant Ezra Levant on the witness stand and, oh my, it was a sight to behold.
The right-wing conservative writer and TV host — alternately dimpling, pointing his index finger at the judge and spreading his arms wide in the broad strokes he appears to favour as much in life as in his writing — was testifying in his defence in his libel suit.
“Testifying” doesn’t quite capture the indefatigable Mr. Levant in full flight Friday at Ontario Superior Court in downtown Toronto.
His evidence-in-chief was part soliloquy, part lecture and all theatre, as befits the man who begins his prime-time, five-days-a-week show on Sun News Network with a monologue which, as he told Judge Wendy Matheson, once went on so long “we had to cancel the commercials” because it had morphed into a “rant” of an hour.
His examination by his lawyer, Iain MacKinnon, for the first several hours consisted of Mr. MacKinnon asking Mr. Levant a question — and, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes later, as Mr. Levant would pause at last, getting to ask another.
Mr. Levant is being sued for $100,000 by Khurrum Awan, a Saskatchewan lawyer who about five years ago was one of a group of Osgoode Hall law students whose unhappiness with a Maclean’s magazine cover story about Muslims blossomed into a series of formal hate-speech complaints filed with three Canadian human rights commissions.
All the complaints were dismissed.
Mr. Levant is alleged to have libelled Mr. Awan in a series of dispatches he live-blogged from the Vancouver human rights hearing — where Mr. Awan testified in lieu of the actual complainant, Mohammed Elmasry, who was then president of the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) — and in several other entries he wrote about 18 months later.
In virtually all these entries, he called Mr. Awan a liar — the blog entries were usually gaily headlined “Khurrum Awan the liar” — and intimated he was also an anti-Semite.
And Friday in court, Mr. Levant, quite cheerfully, repeated the alleged libels. He said he used the word “liar” because “that’s what it was.”
He appeared to hang his hat on the fact that for months after the Maclean’s story appeared, the student lawyers who were unhappy with it said they had asked the magazine to publish a piece in rebuttal that would be written by “a mutually agreeable author,” but when Mr. Awan testified under oath at the B.C. hearing, he admitted that wasn’t true.
In fact, there are several versions of what happened at that meeting between the students and Maclean’s.
Mr. Awan testified the meeting deteriorated so quickly the students never got a chance to ask for the rebuttal piece; another student who was there, Naseem Mithoowani, now a lawyer practising in London, Ont., testified she remembered very clearly the students making the request for a “mutually agreeable author;” and Julian Porter, the magazine’s lawyer who was also there, wrote in his notes the students demanded an unedited piece by a “credible … well-known … prominent Muslim.”
In mid-trial, there is little room for one possible explanation — that these varying accounts are akin to the widely differing versions eyewitnesses to crime often give in good faith, people just seeing and hearing the same alleged perpetrator differently, with descriptions ranging from 5-foot-7 to 6-feet tall, and so on.
Certainly, Mr. Levant was unbowed.
As he put it at one point, winding up a lengthy answer, “Yeah. Khurrum Awan the liar? Yes!” Minutes later, admitting he had got a detail in one of his blog entries wrong, he added, “But my conclusion remains the same — that he’s a damn liar.”
And, as back in the day Mr.
Mr. Levant, quite cheerfully, repeated the alleged libels
Levant allegedly had tarred Mr. Awan with the sins of Mr. Elmasry (he is a rather noted anti-Semite who once announced on television any Israeli citizen over the age of 18 was a fair target for terrorist attack), so did he do so again in his testimony.
Before the Maclean’s story was published and the human rights complaints about it were filed, Mr. Levant once had appeared in a panel discussion with Mr. Elmasry.
According to Mr. Levant, Mr. Elmasry was uncharacteristically open that evening about “the Jews,” which Mr. Levant dismissively pronounced, mocking Mr. Elmasry’s accent it appeared, as “Zhoos,” which he even spelled for the judge.
And so, when he was talking about Mr. Awan — he was once youth president of the CIC but has denied being Mr. Elmasry’s protégé or acolyte — did Mr. Levant again suggest Mr. Awan was anti-Jewish?
Mr. Levant had written an opinion piece in May of 2009 — unusually, as he admitted, in the Toronto Star — expressing his approval of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s support for Israel.
Though he didn’t mention Mr. Awan by name, Mr. Levant had referred to various battles against human rights commissions, including his own in Alberta over his decision at the Western Standard magazine to republish the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
“I was expressing my political Zionism,” he said of the column, and then, clearly outraged, added, “And to this Khurrum Awan is drawn? He re-imposes himself … he’s rebutting me on the subject of Jews and Zionism and Israel?”
Mr. Awan later wrote a letter to the paper, which was published. “I guess his Google alert goes bing!” Mr. Levant said. “That old Zhoos thing coming back again.”
Mr. MacKinnon told the judge in his opening statement Mr. Levant’s defence is largely that of fair comment — traditionally the defence that is the purview of journalists.
And yet Mr. Levant, by his own admission, is not a journalist. “I’m a commentator, I’m a pundit,” he explained to the judge.
“I don’t think in my entire life I’ve ever called myself a reporter.”
And he appears to have considered it Mr. Awan’s responsibility to have contacted him if he had a complaint about what he was writing, when, in fact, most journalists consider it their burden to contact those about whom they’re writing.
Mr. Levant said he saw it almost as a sacred duty to cover the B.C. hearing, because his own skill set is so unique. As he put it, “I knew if I was in that court, by virtue of legal training [he is a lawyer] and personal experience and selftutoring, I’d have observations that were unique.”
A political animal and activist since he was a boy, Mr. Levant once explained to the judge — as ever, he was gesticulating wildly at the time — what he meant when he called Mr. Awan a “junior Al Sharpton.
“Al Sharpton was a political busybody, officious meddler, entrepreneurial operator and media hound who would create a crisis and then offer a solution.” If the shoe fits, etc. He will be cross-examined Monday.